Cookie legislation was introduced in the revision of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, 2003, updated 2011. The forthcoming ePrivacy Directive may make changes to the rules on cookies which will be included in a later update of this Cookie Policy.

Why do we use cookies?

Our use of cookies is to primarily help enhance your user experience and to improve the efficiency of our website. We use certain cookies to remember you when you visit the website, to keep track of browsing patterns and to understand how visitors use the website site.

What are cookies?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. There are different types of cookies: some are essential for the site to operate properly, whereas others are aimed at enhancing and personalising your user experience. Cookies can help us to understand how consumers are interacting with our website, which helps us to improve our site and deliver a better service to you.

What cookies do we use?

Strictly necessary cookies

Generally, these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies. Not all first-party session cookies will fall into the strictly necessary category for the purposes of the Cookie legislation. Strictly necessary cookies will generally be used to store a unique identifier to manage and identify the user as unique to other users currently viewing the website, in order to provide a consistent and accurate service to the user.

Essential Cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as signing-up to receive emails from us.

Performance Cookies

These cookies generally collect information about how visitors use our website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and the pages that they don’t. This helps us to understand and improve the site so it is easy to use and includes helpful content. They allow us to fix bugs or glitches on the website. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies visitors, so we can’t identify you. For example, we use “Google Analytics” cookies (a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc).

Functionality Cookies

These cookies allow our website to remember the choices you make as you browse the site. They provide more enhanced and personal features. The information collected is anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other sites once you leave our site.

Following is a table of our use of cookies with the duration we have set.

Description

Type of cookie

Duration

_ga – used to distinguish users

Persistent

2 years

_gid – used to distinguish users

Persistent

24 hours

_gat – used for throttle date request rate

Persistent

1 minute

_gac_<property-id> – linking up Google adword account

Persistent

90 days

__atuvc – is created and read by the AddThis social sharing site JavaScript on the client side in order to make sure the user sees the updated count if they share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated. No data from that cookie is sent back to AddThis and removing it when disabling cookies would cause unexpected behaviour for users.

Persistent

2 years

__atssc – Used to manage the share count, until the sharing cache is updated.

Persistent

2 Years

__atuvs – This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. This is believed to be a new cookie from AddThis which is not yet documented, but has been categorised on the assumption it serves a similar purpose to other cookies set by the service.

Persistent

2 Years

cb-enabled – This cookie stores whether a visitor has accepted the cookie policy so that it can be hidden from view.

Persistent

1 Year

Youtube Cookies

Description

Type of cookie

Duration

Youtube Cookies – we have embedded videos from youtube so following cookies may get set too

PREF

VSC

VSITOR_INFO1_LIVE

remote_sid

Persistent

Persistent

Persistent

Persistent

8 months

End of the session

8 months

End of the session

How to turn off cookies

You can turn off cookies at any time, by going into your browser settings, however this may have a detrimental effect on your user experience. If you are happy to continue letting us use cookies in the ways set out in this policy, to help us guide our work, then you need not do anything.